Interview with Harmony Korine

26 Oct 2009

We speak to the director of Trash Humpers.

Trash Humpers, the latest from indie provocateur Harmony Korine, has become perhaps the most divisive film to hit the festival circuit since Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Documenting the bizarre and perverse antics of a group of social misfits, this uncategorisable work of mayhem confirms Korine as one of the most idiosyncratic directors currently working in America, or indeed the world. He joined us yesterday to discuss, among other things, analogue technology, moral outrage and the death of narrative cinema.

Did you feel a need to get back to basics after Mister Lonely, which was a relatively big budget film?

For me, the making of Mister Lonely was great, but everything around it was a very old model. In a lot of ways, I feel like that way of putting films together - sitting around waiting for money to come through, waiting for actors - it works against all your creative impulses, it feels like someone's cutting your head off. Maybe it's just my personality, but I'm very impatient. I just like making things, so I wanted to try to figure out a way where I could move as quickly as I could think, to have a concept and an idea, whatever that might be, and just act on it. So it was a very nice thing to do after the eight years it took me to make the last movie.

Why did you decide to shoot with VHS cameras?

I wanted to make something that had its own logic and more closely resembled a found artefact or old VHS tape that someone had buried in a ditch somewhere. It was more about a collection of moments, a home movie, than it was about anything else. I grew up in the age of VHS. I had one of the first cameras and I know what it's like to re-use tapes over and over again. Everyone is so obsessed now with clarity and pixels and high definition, so I think there's something hypnotic and beautiful about the fog of analogue. There's something nice about forcing yourself to squint a little bit and work to see what's behind the image.

You once said that no one remembers the plot when they see a great film. Is that sentiment still a driving force behind your work?

It's not that I set out to destroy plot or be an anti-narrative crusader, it's just that what moves me most when watching a film is often something intangible. Very early on, I questioned why I should use the same basic three-act structure that everyone else uses. I could throw those devices in, but they always feel fake to me. I don't think like that, I never felt that life was like that. So the movies I make are more cumulative in effect. What I try to do primarily is make them experiential.

You seem to gravitate towards quite warped characters. What is it that appeals to you about people on the fringes?

Maybe because these are my friends and the people I grew up around. I spent a lot of time as a kid at carnivals, travelling with the circus. There was always a great energy there. I never thought of them as freakish until other people pointed it out. It's like you might see someone through a window and think they're beautiful, and someone else will look at them and think they're disgusting. You're just attracted to what you're attracted to.

Does the festival circuit give you the security to take bigger artistic risks? You're in a position where you can make a film like Trash Humpers, and though it may not get wide distribution, you know that people around the world will still get to see it.

Honestly, I think I'm always a little bit delusional. Even with Trash Humpers, before making it I thought this was going to be a humongous commercial success. I'm always thinking that the films are going to play in shopping malls, and all the teenagers are going to see them, and that Miley Cyrus and all her friends are going to start singing songs about them. Then gradually, moment by moment, I realise that's not going to be the case. So of course it's nice that these festivals exist, especially for someone like me.

There have been reports of mass walkouts at screenings of Trash Humpers. Why do your films provoke such strong reactions?

Just because they're so great. Most of those people don't know how to take such greatness! There's so much emotion in the films, it's too intense for people to deal with. But I wanted to give this one as literal a name as possible, I wanted people to know exactly what they were in for. I'm not trying to trick anyone, I'm not telling people that this movie is about unicorns, it is about people that fuck trash! It's about people who are artists of mischief, who get pure glee out of sadism, true joy out of doing horrible things, to the extent that they almost turn it into an art form. Smashing light bulbs, burning down houses and tap dancing in parking lots becomes something exceptional. But honestly, there are always people walking out of my movies, that's why I tell them at the beginning to just walk out before it starts.

I'm surprised that it still happens. Surely people should know the deal by now?

Me too! People are still getting angry at the same things they were angry at fifteen years ago.

Paul O'Callaghan

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